Hi guys, I'm new to the forums, and have reserved a Sony Reader at my local Borders. Apparently, the store will have 7 units come friday.

In my excitement, I've been reading up about the Reader, and gazing at pictures dreamily, eagerly awaiting my little "book" of joy.

A few questions stuck in my mind, though.

1.) Is there any way to turn off the "Page 45 of 71" business at the bottom of the screen? I know the thing I enjoy most about reading is not really knowing when it's going to end. I'd like to know what page I'm currently on, but it would be nice if there was an option to turn off how many pages there are to go. Perhaps you think me pedantic, but this is more like a real book, non?

2.) This 7,500 page turns... Is that straight-through page turns, or does this number include having the unit "sleeping" for however long? iPods are rated for a number of hours, but if you leave the unit asleep for a few weeks, you can turn it on and see your battery life has decreased significantly. Any thoughts?

3.) Can someone give me a Reader right now, because I'm gagging for one! Not sure I can wait till Friday, and that's if my Borders really does get it in!

2) That's a very good question, the 7500 pages is supposed to be straight through page flips, I believe. And I'm sure that the batt will slowly lose charge even when it's not used, it's a Li-Ion, they do that. But nobody (except Sony, and they ain't sayin') has had one long enough to really answer what you (and we) really want to know: "how long will it last for me?" Ask us again in a couple of months.

3) If any of us had one one, do you really think we'd let go of it? We do feel your pain, though.

The thing I'm most interested in is the way the Sony Reader handles "idle" mode. As soon as somebody has their reader, I'd be glad if they could do me and us all the favour of just leaving it on, not switchign it off after reading to see how much energy it loses when it's not actively in use (like noting the battery status before you go to bed and then again when you get up in thte morning).

This is one of the major points of complaints I have with the Iliad. I uses just about the same amount of power when it's just lying there as when I'm reading and flipping pages!!!

...see how much energy it loses when it's not actively in use (like noting the battery status before you go to bed and then again when you get up in thte morning)....

That'll be mostly pointless, CommanderROR, it shuts itself down after an hour!

I can tell you that the battery meters still read full after we played with them hard for about five hours. Lots of page flipping, file loading, music playing, etc., and no charging. I think that's a good sign, anyway.

@scotty1024: It all depends on whether they enabled the option in the software/OS. At least it does until the hacking community gets going.

If I wanted to read PDFs on the device, how would that work? I understand that 8.5x11-formatted PDFs will be, for all intents and purposes, unreadable on the Reader. Will there be any software for converting the PDFs to a Reader-readable state?

If I wanted to read PDFs on the device, how would that work? I understand that 8.5x11-formatted PDFs will be, for all intents and purposes, unreadable on the Reader. Will there be any software for converting the PDFs to a Reader-readable state?

Actually it depends on the PDF. I wrote a Librie tool that converts PDF's into BBeB "image files" e.g. each page is a 800x600 JPEG of the PDF page. With the right font size in the original they were quite viewable on the Librie. If it was a science journal document in 8pt type: no way. Nikon D70 user manual: works.

I'd also take PDF's rotate them and then crop each page into two pages and place them into a BBeB file. That worked MUCH better for a larger range of PDF's (and is the same concept as Sony's rotate trick.)

The major limitation to this line of exploration was that BBeB files larger than 15MB (about 150 pages) tended to crash the Librie. So I spent most of my time on the re-flow path where 15MB gave you a tremendous number of pages.

Now that Sony has a viewer for PDF, and it can rotate and crop pages, I expect people will be pleasantly surprised (especially if Sony auto-crops the white margins).